Revisiting Television Programming: Family Values under the Spotlight

Despite the mushrooming of countless means of information and communication technologies over the last two decades, the position of television as a medium of imparting information, offering rich menus of entertainment, and more importantly shaping peoples? perception of social reality and molding the national public opinion has barely waned. Surprisingly enough, this medium has successfully managed to gain more momentum and vivacity. It is now readily viewable on various digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and smart mobile phones. With the advent of digital broadcasting satellite technology, moral panics have often erupted as to the alleged injurious effects of the consumption of material produced in Latin America, Western Europe, the United States, in addition to religious programs aired on many Arab channels. Concerns have been mainly voiced with regard to the erosion of Moroccan traditional family values and the endorsement of rather ?alien? attitudes towards areas relating to extramarital relations, abortion, family type, single parenthood, same-sex marriages, polygamy and divorce. The purpose of this paper, then, was to examine the effects of the content of these tele-visual programming on the attitudes and perceptions of Moroccan young viewers. Hence, two major hypotheses were put forward and a questionnaire was used as the instrument to gather data from the respondents. The results of the quantitative analysis, which harnessed both descriptive and inferential statistics, did not lead to the corroboration of the stated postulates though the study revealed a number of interesting findings.